


Selenography

by AdelaCathcart



Series: Violators [9]
Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust - Philip Pullman
Genre: Angst and Romance, Arctic Exploration, Broken Bones, Canon Compliant, Dream Sex, Everybody Cries, Everybody Hurts, F/M, Finger Sucking, Gratuitous French, Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Hurt, Marisa is a succubus, Marisa is the man behind the Winkie's, Needlessly Complex Power Bottoming, Pre-Canon, Setting-Typical Sexism, Wet Dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:47:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24711844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdelaCathcart/pseuds/AdelaCathcart
Summary: “I didn’t miss you,” she hisses, not looking at him as his thumb brushes her cheek, but her voice is shaking like a trapped animal; she reaches for him with a trembling hand. “Not for one moment. Not at all.”It’s a relief just to be near her, a breath taken just in time. He cups her face in his hand and kisses it, not even kissing, really, just smearing his muzzle desperately over her cheeks, her forehead, her eyes. “You awful woman,” he mutters. “What in God’s name did you do to me?” But he knows the answer well enough already. She stole something precious from him, something minute but essential, a pituitary gland, a thyroid, and now that she has it she can touch him whenever she wants. If he’s ever to be whole he must force their bodies together, and borrow himself back from her.
Relationships: Lord Asriel/Marisa Coulter
Series: Violators [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610350
Comments: 17
Kudos: 47





	1. A Ten-Ton Catastrophe on a Sixty-Pound Chain

**Author's Note:**

> As a final entry in the "Violators" series, this will be a two-part fic. The first chapter is about Asriel alone in the Arctic. The second will be Asriel and Marisa together at—where else?—the Royal Arctic Institute, and will be posted at the beginning of July. (The sex is mostly in the second part. Don't worry, it will be worth the wait.) It's been a lot of fun to write these. Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> If you enjoy my work please support efforts to abolish the irredeemably racist and corrupt American police force, and stand up for trans rights. Every person deserves to live with dignity and unafraid.
> 
>   
> "Until the late nineteenth century, the Antarctic continent had been as remote as the moon. In fact, it is part of the public mythology that even today large tracts of the moon are better known than Antarctica. Polar explorers were the astronauts of their day, literally stepping off the edge of the map and into the unknown."  
> — _A History of Tourism, Leisure and Adventure in the Antarctic and Sub-Antarctic, c.1895 to Present_ , Wouter Pierre Hanekom
> 
> “I want someone who’ll accept the truth about me and doesn’t need protection. If I’m a bitch and a fake, is there nobody who will love a bitch and a fake?” — _The End of the Affair_ by Graham Greene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asriel has a dream that upsets him so badly he almost dies.

Moonlight lends the bleak landscape of the Arctic a particular lunar quality. A glacier glows like a pearl. The same body, austere and inaccessible overhead, spreads itself underfoot, becomes seductive: it caresses with harsh winds, kisses with snowfall, beckons with the arms of a crevasse. It is a lover which, given the chance, will annihilate you. The moon reflects sunlight, but the snow reflects moonlight, and between these twin celestial mirrors, flung into the silver-black relief of a photogram, the nuances of individual identity appear so mean as to be imperceptible. Name and station, home and family are shed like heavy vestments. A man disappears, and is in nothingness reborn, with no means but the corporeal to understand the world around him. Thus a desolate snowscape, under certain conditions, reveals to the fragile human observer a trembling, ecstatic glimpse of truth, of infinity.

These are the conditions Asriel has chosen for his work. This experiment requires proximity to the Aurora, which isn't difficult, but it also requires altitude, and it involves cumbersome philosophical instruments which won’t tolerate rigorous travel, so he signs up for an expedition in Beringland to a mountain of a serviceable elevation, but not too remote, with which his climbing partner, Jackson, has a little familiarity. The base camp is established six thousand feet above sea level, and after that they see very little of the rest of the team. Every night Jackson and Asriel ski a proscribed circuit of the mountain alongside a sledge loaded with equipment. Jackson’s Malamute dæmon, Kani, leads the dogs, and Stelmaria stalks austerely alongside. It’s grueling but exhilarating work. At two dozen specially chosen points around the summit they take meticulous readings of the local anbaromagnetic activity, while the Aurora swoops and flares in vast livid arcs overhead. When their work is complete they return to camp and share the morning meal they call dinner, and then drop into their cots to sleep the black sleep of the dead. Soon after that, the rest of the expedition rises to greet another tardy Arctic dawn.

The Yupik people native to Beringland have spoken for generations of ice-cold ghosts which loom up out of the darkness through unseen apertures to the land beyond. Any mortal who sees one must lay his hands on the corpselike shoulders of the uncanny creature as soon as it appears, and force it back. After three weeks’ worth of observation Asriel begins to suspect that these tales are more than mere superstition, conceived to keep restless children in their beds at night—they may even be practical advice. As he hoped, there are phenomena at work in these mountains which natural philosophers have not yet begun to explain.

“Look here,” he says to Jackson, unrolling a topographical map on the folding table while his partner melts snow over a miniature gas stove for the next day’s water rations. “These readings show a pattern of elevated activity at checkpoint 16, near this ridge on the northwest traverse, but only when we take them after midnight. In the early evening it’s indistinguishable from points 15 and 17, but there are similar fluctuations, though not so dramatic, concentrated at 22 and 23 for the first part of the night. What does that suggest to you?”

“Where’s 23?” says Jackson, craning his neck to see the map. Asriel jabs a finger at the mountain’s eastern face. “Huh…”

“And 22 is here, with 21 on almost the same latitude but at a lower elevation, and no significant change in anbaromagnetic activity.”

Jackson ladles steaming snowmelt from the kettle into a coffeepot and two tin bowls of rations. Licking a spatter of reconstituted gravy from his thumb he pushes one of the meals across the table to Asriel and takes a seat.

“So it’s a heliophobic phenomenon,” he says, chewing thoughtfully.

“It looks that way. It could have to do with the temperature, or might it be some other quality of the solar energy itself…? We’ll need to scout out some new checkpoints at a higher elevation to compare.”

Jackson grins. “Getting restless, Asriel?”

“So it would seem.” He squints up at the roof of the green coal-silk tent, thinking. “Today we’ll make our rounds as usual. We can be finished by midnight if we skip some of less active checkpoints along the south. That will give us several hours to rest before we set out for a hike around the summit just after dawn on Friday.”

“No time to waste, then," Jackson agrees. "Let's get to it.”

He gets no response: Asriel is already halfway out the door.

Throughout the half-day of work Asriel is giddy, nearly manic. Delighted with how well his work is progressing, he only pauses his monologue long enough to make his notes. He drives onward with such relentless energy that they make it back to camp earlier than planned, before eleven-thirty, and Jackson has to insist that they not double back to take readings at the checkpoints they'd agreed not to bother with. Asriel is asleep as soon as his eyes close.

He wakes in his own bed, back in London.

The bedchamber is bathed in grayish half-light, and he can’t remember how he got here. The clock is unreadable. The air is stifling. Stelmaria is crouched at his side, ears flat against her head, a soft growl in her throat, and her fear frightens him. He turns, tracking her gaze.

There’s a woman in the next room, the one that had been his mother’s. They can see her through the wall. Her eyes glint like mirrors and the glare obscures her face. A soft breeze stirs her fair hair. She’s lying on her back, soft and pale as moonlight, gleaming with moisture, legs spread, lips parted. An invitation. A demand.

He’s beginning to sweat. It’s cool where she is, and dark. She’s calling his name without moving her mouth. He wants to go to her but he can’t find the door. He might be able to break through the wall but then she’d know how hard he’s trying.

“Asriel,” she says in his mind. He knows her voice as well as his own but somehow he can’t place it. Every molecule of iron in his blood responds: his body is a compass point, oriented urgently toward the true North beckoning from that inaccessible room. The wall is horribly rough and dry under his cheek, but her pull is merciless. He feels desperately thirsty.

He falls through, and lands face-first on the hard floor of the tent.

His tongue is like a wad of cotton wool in his mouth, and he gropes for his canteen. The tent feels cramped and stuffy. He throws on his leggings, boots and parka, and goes outside to clear his head.

Above, the Aurora trembles like a living thing, in hypnotic arcs and cascades of rose and emerald green, fainter than usual in the light of the full moon setting between two low peaks to the west. His dæmon shivers with pleasure by his side: ever since she settled on their very first expedition, there's never been any true home for her but this. Orienting himself by the stars, Asriel walks away from camp, until he can’t see tents or sledge tracks, or hear the sounds of men asleep. Dreaming of London is troubling to him. It’s an unwelcome distraction, a pointless sentimental dalliance, and worse, some part of the illusion is still clinging to him, pulling him back against his will. He paces, counts his steps, trying to forget.

Stelmaria senses his unease and doesn't let him dodge it. "What were you dreaming?" 

Asriel stops walking and crouches, eyes automatically following the spectacle above. "We were back in London. There was someone there, in Mother's room." He looks down, then directly into his dæmon's golden eyes. "A woman."

"You've had that dream before."

"Not like this. This was..." He grimaces, not wanting to let the words out.

"Erotic," she supplies. Asriel nods yes. "Who was she?"

"I couldn't see her face."

"Does that matter?" He doesn't answer, so she presses. "Let's try to think it through. What did she want?"

He shakes his head wearily, rubbing his eyes; she can feel little leftover tendrils of dream tugging faintly at his consciousness. "I don't know. Me." He turns his face upward again, but now he's far away, unseeing, disappearing deep in his own mind. Suddenly he stands, and points into the sky. "Those vertical formations. What is that? Do you see it, Stelmaria?"

She does: for a moment there are turrets, palm trees, something like a city. Then it vanishes. Man and dæmon stare at each other in wonder, neither wanting to speak.

In his next dream he’s still pacing in the snow. It’s nighttime but the stars are crazily skewed, there’s no moon and he’s thirstier than ever. He looks to the west and sees the woman is there too, beneath two low peaks, pearly white and half-buried in ice. Is she dead? Could he see her face, touch her? Perhaps revive her? She sighs, her head turning fitfully from side to side, as if searching for something. She's alive. She needs him. Elated, he runs to her and while Stelmaria digs with her claws, he digs with his bare fingers, ignoring the ice shards in his nails and the itchy ache of incipient chilblains.

The moment he frees her hands she raises them and lays them on his eyes, cold wet fingertips lightly pressing the lids shut, so he never sees her face but continues blind. His thirst is overwhelming now. He licks her clammy palms and their taste is mineral and pure as snow. One by one, he sucks her fingers, investigating her wrinkled fingerprints with his parched tongue. Clasping her wrist, he extends her arm, drinking cool spring water off her inner elbow, and her pulse throbs strong and steady on his mouth. Her rounded shoulder is a smooth wet stone. He sips melting ice from the hollow of her collarbone, presses his face into her chest hard enough to feel her heartbeat punching between her ribs. He licks raindrops off the soft peak of her breast. His lips close around it and that’s when he realizes who she is. He recognizes the small, hard nipple in his mouth.

It’s not the taste of snow anymore, it’s the creamy, resinous taste of her skin. He kisses her mouth and no one else on Earth kisses like that. “This is no dream,” he whispers.

“No,” murmurs the sweet, familiar voice. She opens his eyes.

Everywhere he’s touched her the skin is mottled pink: under his hands she’s coming back to life. He licks every part of her, until his thirst is slaked and she’s no ice maiden moving beneath him but a living, breathing woman, voluptuous and hungry. She guides him into her and the fusion of their bodies sparks a wave of heat like a furnace door opening. Under her, a lush carpet of moss begins to bloom.

She rocks him in her arms for what feels like hours, but it’s real, it’s real, her skin tastes of sharp female sweat, little suppressed moans gurgle softly in her throat, there’s the silvery white scar below her thumb. Their dæmons twine together in an indistinguishable blur of gold and silver. Her pleasure is limitless, her head thrown back in ecstasy again and again, and as she regains herself her dark eyes always search his face, fingertips tracing his features delicately as if to memorize him. Sometimes she seems on the verge of tears, though he can't remember why, but he feels an echo of her sorrow in his own heart. At other times she's angry, spitting and clawing, and he struggles with her until she succumbs to love again. She keeps him on the precipice for a long time, instinctively slowing when his orgasm draws too near, and though it’s frustrating he feels so pleasantly lazy in her arms he doesn’t mind, but eventually his patience is exhausted, and when she would deny him he only holds her tighter, fucks her harder. Just before the wave crashes over him she dissolves, her sweet hot cunt evaporates, and he ejaculates miserably, without pleasure, into his reeking sleeping bag.

The dream lingers in his body all day long, like the pleasant sensation of waves after a day at the seashore. Damp gooseflesh under his parched tongue, the graceful swimming movements of her hips. Every time his mind wanders her ghost moves through him again. As he and and his partner explore new areas of the mountain, he shoos her from his thoughts over and over, and once his attention is elsewhere she comes back, like a flock of crows insistently settling over scattered corn.

By noon he thinks he’s probably shaken her. They pause in the shelter of a stern rock face on one side and, safely distant though downhill, a long, suspicious indentation in the glacier, obscured by recent snow, to share pemmican and roasted cashews, foods with enough fat to keep cold blood in motion. They’ve scouted five locations at this higher elevation that it won’t be too difficult to drag equipment to, where the veil between the worlds might be thin enough to be perceived by his crude machine. Asriel is pleased with their progress, and eager to bring his new device up here and see what it can do. The salty meal makes him thirsty, and he wanders a little ways from his partner to admire the view as he scoops a clump of gravelly snow and brings it to his mouth. The fresh mineral taste that breaks over his tongue is only the taste of her skin. Gooseflesh, smooth river stones. The memory makes him shudder. His feet go out from under him.

He’s slipping.

No conscious thought now, as the ice rushes past his body gathering speed, kicking clouds of powder up to obscure the yawning mouth of the crevasse that lurches up to swallow him, no emotions and no images, not even fear, only the hideous awe of the void and a word, just one, phonetics without meaning.

_Marisa. Marisa._

He strikes out wildly with his ice axe and it thunks hard into the sheer glacier face with a jerk that cracks his body like a whip against the ice. He’s saved himself, he thinks for a smug half-second, but then sickening, resonant agony shatters his confidence and the arm holding the axe goes dead. He throws his right hand up to grasp for the cauchuc-wrapped handle and holds firm, just in time, as the left drops uselessly to his side.

Stelmaria is yelping in terror, he can see her shadow pacing the lip of the crevasse twenty feet above him, and Jackson’s voice calling his name is perilously near. “I’m all right!” he calls to them, though saying so won’t make it true. “Get away from the edge for God’s sake!”

“Hang on, Asriel!” Jackson yells back, as if he had any choice. He hears Jackson and Stelmaria conferring quietly, and there are crunching sounds in the ice above as Jackson places anchors for his own descent. His Malamute dæmon is nervously whining. Stelmaria crouches overhead and stares down at Asriel passionately, her tawny eyes full of love and dread. Jackson has thrown down a line to him, but he has no way to grab it. The arm holding the ice axe is cramping badly, and he kicks into the glacier with the spiked toes of his crampons, gaining a little purchase to take some weight off his shoulder, but too much movement could loosen the axe blade’s bite. His eyes never leave his dæmon, as if the bond between them had a physical strength that could hold him. When he falls—if he falls—the shattering of his body will be pleasure compared to the pain of being torn from her.

The leopard looks over her shoulder, then back to her man. “Jackson’s coming down,” she says briefly.

“Can you move that arm?” Jackson calls as he lowers himself to his partner. Asriel shakes his head. The other man’s hands run over his body, testing the integrity of his harness, and he hears a carabiner clip him to the extra line. “Well, what's an arm more or less,” Jackson says brightly, taking up some slack on the line. Right now levity is their best defense against panic. “That's why you've got a spare, isn't it? That’ll hold you. Let go.”

Asriel forces his stiff fingers to unclench, trusting himself to Jackson's skill and to fate, and the momentary drop sets off a stutter in his heart. The cable goes suddenly taut when he transfers his weight from the axe to the harness. Dangling freely over the crevasse he finally allows himself to look down to its bottom, but there’s no bottom to see. Hurriedly he swings himself upright, hugging the line with his good arm. Jackson is placing screws in the ice around him, rigging up an improvised sling to lash Asriel to the cliff face. They came prepared for some minor climbing today, but neither anticipated a vertical ascent like this, and both know they don’t have the right equipment on hand to lift a one-armed man to safety.

As leader it’s Asriel’s responsibility to say what they’re both thinking: “Leave me here. Go back to base camp and bring help.”

"You sure?"

"Yes. But walk a little faster than you did this morning. I'd rather not be here overnight if you can help it."

Jackson laughs and as he goes he keeps laughing. Even false laughter can keep fear at bay. There's no need for Asriel to succumb to despair as the sound of his friend's voice dissolves in the susurrating wind.

It’s dark in the crevasse, and painful to face up into the bright opening, only about the length of his hand when his arm is extended, but the silhouette of his dæmon’s head is all he wants to see, so Asriel lets his eyes water and he looks and looks. The first ecstatic rush of adrenaline is receding, and the pain in his shoulder resurfaces angrily.

“This is bad, Stelmaria.”

“You were distracted,” she says tersely, as if he didn’t know. Her eyes glow green at him in the mountain’s shadow. Far above her head a tern is wheeling.

“You should have warned me.”

“I was distracted too.”

Time passes. He tries to make his mind go blank, but every time he lets it drift it goes doggedly to that moment when the snow shifted beneath him, uselessly analyzing every false move. There was no way to prepare for an accident like this and dwelling on it won’t help him get out. What’s done is done. The last faint wisps of sweet lassitude offer themselves, and he chases them down a darkened hallway, away from consciousness. He dozes, with his cheek cradled on the ice, until a shift in the light disturbs him.

Long red hair is pouring into the fissure like rays of dawn. A witch is peering down at him indifferently. The tern dæmon says something in her ear. She addresses Asriel in a Muscovite dialect, perhaps asking him his business, he’s not sure. He’s not fluent in the language and his face is numb, but he does his best to respond.

“I’m an scientist from Brytain. My name is Asriel. Please, I’m hurt. I need help.”

“Tatiana,” she says simply.

Holding her cloud-pine one-handed she leans into the crevasse and extends her long white arm to him, grasping him just above the elbow. He wonders how she’s going to manage his weight but she lifts him as effortlessly as a man would lift an infant, and as they rise through the air the metal screws that had anchored him to the ice wall rip free like buttons popping off a blouse. Little shards shake loose from his crampons and drift into oblivion.

The witch places him fifty feet from the crevasse, in a rock outcropping too shallow to be called a cave, but it’s enough to shield him from the wind at least. Stelmaria bounds to him and lands blessedly heavy on his chest, knocking the air out of him, and he clutches her tightly, filling his fists with her thick fur. She’s furious with him, of course, but that can wait.

“You cold?” asks the witch, amused, watching him remove his balaclava so his dæmon can lick his face. She conjures a little campfire from bits of stone and lichen, and he thanks her with the only thing he has that she might want. Her touch is like a potent opiate: while she’s with him the pain of his dislocated shoulder is vast, but also soft and distant, like the Milky Way. She doesn’t offer to heal him and he doesn’t know how to ask. Then, apparently deciding she’s been waylaid long enough, she offers a cloud-pine sprig and wordlessly takes flight, leaving him agonized and exhausted.

Six hours later Jackson returns, with a medic and a sledge and some rapidly dwindling hopes. There’s no sign of his friend where he went over, just some claw marks in the snow where the abandoned ice axe is sticking, and raw holes in the cliff face where the anchor screws had been. No climber is a stranger to untimely death, and he knows that for men like them there’s no other way to go, but it always hurts like hell to lose a friend. He exchanges a look with the medic, who solemnly opens the thermos of hot brandy they’d brought for Asriel and takes a reverent swig. Then he passes it to Jackson, and he drinks too, and goes to pour a little of the steaming liquor on the last place on Earth the great man ever stood.

Then his Malamute dæmon barks, twice. “Uriah! Over here!” she yelps, running back and forth across the snow with her tail furiously wagging. Tucked into a cleft in the rock face, with his big snow leopard dæmon curled around him for warmth, they find Lord Asriel, snoring by the ashes of a campfire. His left arm is bent obscenely backwards, his leggings are on inside-out, his face is chapped and raw, his nose is blue, and in his sleep he’s grinning like a jackass.

He shudders and blinks up at them with icy lashes framing a madman’s white-rimmed glare. “Gentlemen!” he booms, struggling to work his frozen mouth. “I lived!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from "Jubilee Street" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
> 
> Yupik ghost stories: http://tundramedicinedreams.blogspot.com/2006/10/yupik-eskimo-ghost-stories.html


	2. She Had a Little Black Book, My Name Was Written on Every Page

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asriel and Marisa fuck all over the Royal Arctic Institute.

“Gentlemen,” he concludes, “I lived.”

As he delivers this closing remark, Lord Asriel scans the audience assembled in the Lecture Theater of the Royal Arctic Institute. Most of his presentation was addressed to the first few rows only, where honored benefactors and senior members of the Institute are seated, and now, his duty discharged, curiosity compels him for the first time to look beyond. As expected, it’s a uniform sea of dark suits, broad bearded faces—until he spies the one exception, slim and fair, her lovely dark eyes vivid with passion. Stelmaria’s head snaps up in alarm. 

An anbaric arc leaps wide between two high-voltage generators, tearing a brief blazing-white rift in the universe. His heart races suddenly, his skin seizes then goes numb. The woman should be more composed, having claimed for herself the advantage of surprise, but her expression when he looks at her is stricken, as if she’s been slapped. There’s no one else in the room.

Five long seconds pass, and then abrupt, thunderous applause rolls in and Asriel remembers himself—at the dais, with all eyes on him. He smiles and nods in gracious acknowledgement, raising his right hand, the one not immobilized by a canvas sling, for silence.

“Thank you. Now I’d like to open the floor to questions.”

Nearly a week has gone by since he returned from Beringland, and in that time he hasn’t permitted himself to contact her. He invents impediments—no time for it, no method safe, she’s certainly moved on—and even goes so far as to resent her for imposing them, but the truth is that the sooner he sees her, the sooner she’ll go, and he prefers the familiar ache of waiting to a fresh wound. It’s really a matter of endurance, no different from boyhood competitions to stay underwater the longest, lungs burning, throat aching. The trick is to swear it’s only one moment more, and then one more after that. Taking one breath makes you greedy for another. Keep lying to yourself, and you can almost forget you need air to live. The will is stronger than the needs of the body, or even the needs of the soul.

He takes questions and pretends he hasn’t seen her.

She loiters at the rear of the theater, examining a case of carved walrus tusks, but when he begins to break away from his colleagues she locks eyes with him through the glass before melting into the darkened hallway at her back. It leads, Asriel knows, to administrative offices, unoccupied this late in the evening. Promising to meet his friends downstairs for dinner, he jovially excuses himself.

He finds the hallway empty, as if the woman he saw had been a ghost, and then she rises, ghostlike, from the wall on his left. She doesn’t run to him as he’d thought she might, and in the dim light it’s difficult to make out her expression. Her monkey dæmon starts forward, but she restrains him, stepping lightly on his tail.

She studies Asriel coldly. He curls his fingers in his dæmon’s fur.

“Did you miss me?” Marisa asks at last.

“I dreamed of you.”

Even in the darkness her satisfaction is unmistakable. “I thought you would.”

He moves to her but she backs up, so he grabs her by the elbow with his good hand to shepherd her into a corner. His injured shoulder abuts the wall beside her and his other arm extends to close her in. Then he bends down to inhale the familiar scent of her hair, sweeter and more complex than his meager memory could ever conjure.

“I didn’t miss you,” she hisses, not looking at him as his thumb brushes her cheek, but her voice is shaking like a trapped animal; she reaches for him with a trembling hand. “Not for one moment. Not at all.”

It’s a relief just to be near her, a breath taken only just in time. He cups her face in his hand and kisses it, not even kissing, really, just smearing his muzzle desperately over her cheeks, her forehead, her eyes. “You awful woman,” he mutters. “What in God’s name did you do to me?” But he knows the answer well enough already. She stole something precious from him, something minute but essential, a pituitary gland, a thyroid, and now that she has it she can touch him whenever she wants. If he’s ever to be whole he must force their bodies together, and borrow himself back from her.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she sniffs.

“Kiss me.”

She searches his face with frightened eyes, as if he’d asked her to jump off a cliff, and then suddenly grabs his head with both hands and pulls his mouth against hers. There’s little tenderness in it—she forces his jaw open with her own and almost sucks the tongue out of his mouth, then worries his lower lip between her teeth so hard he expects it to split. She kisses him as if she means to kill him, and this too is a relief. Even when she hugs him tightly around the neck, carelessly pulling on his injured shoulder, he can’t bring himself to stop her—pain is just another sensation, after all, pleasure’s wise elder sister, proof he’s alive and she’s real. Every feeling exchanged between them is a gift. He tastes saltwater leaking in at the corners of her mouth, and pulls back to find her face is wet with tears.

“Come away with me,” he says, allowing her to wipe her eyes.

“Won’t you be missed?”

Asriel glances over his shoulder. There’s dinner waiting, powerful benefactors to charm and rivals to subdue. “Later, then,” he concedes.

“He’ll want me at home.”

“ _I_ want you." He pounces on the soft spot under her jaw, where she tastes like neroli and aldehyde, then licks the hollow of her throat and sucks lightly at her pulse. She tries to pull him in closer, wanting more, but he only grins, touching her neck with his teeth. She gives a little sigh of frustration.

“Have me here?”

“It’s not enough. You know it’s not.”

“Nothing's enough.” He fumbles for the nearest door handle and she shakes her head. “That’s no use. They’re all locked. I’ve a hairpin, though, if this is really where you want to—”

“I don’t care where—“

“ _Qui est là?_ ” A shrill voice is calling from the doorway to the Lecture Theater. “ _Allô? Serait-ce vous, Madame Coulter?_ ”

“Ugh,” Marisa mutters, brushing Asriel aside and hurrying down the hall to intercept the man before he can come in. “ _Oui, c’est moi, monsieur le directeur. Quel plaisir de vous revoir._ ”

“ _Tout le plaisir est pour moi, Madame. Je pourrais reconnaître votre voix n’importe où. Mais cherchez-vous quelque chose? Tous ces bureaux sont fermés…_ ”

Asriel trails after her, hugging the wall, his footsteps as stealthy as his dæmon’s. Marisa is chatting breezily with the director of programming, a garrulous man from New France. She’s leaning coquettishly against the doorjamb, but he can see she’s chosen this position because to enter the hall the director would be forced to shove her aside. She reaches down smoothly to help the monkey to her shoulder, and when her hand drops back to her side, Asriel snatches it, pressing a kiss to her knuckles.

“ _Qu’avez-vous pensé de le conférence? Plus excitant que d’habitude, n’est-ce pas?_ ”

“ _Oui, si tout cela s'est vraiment passé. Il m’a semblé que l’homme était un peu imbu de sa personne…”_

Turning her hand over, Asriel bites hard into the meat at the base of her thumb until he detects a hitch in her voice, then he eases off and laps the impression of his teeth, tasting for blood. He sucks her thumb so deeply it impedes the movement of his throat when he swallows, and his tongue rests in the salt cleft of her palm. He bends her hand back to kiss its bony heel, and her inner wrist, which also tastes of perfume. He hooks his eyeteeth around her wedding ring and threatens to suck it off her finger until she jerks her arm nervously away. Catching her wrist, he swallows her index and middle fingers together, suggestively probing the seam between them with the sharp point of his tongue. She whimpers, only slightly, but it gets the director’s attention.

“ _Vous allez bien, Madame?_ ”

“ _Très bien, merci, mais—je viens de me souvenir—il y a une livre qui m’attend à la biblioteque en haut. Désolée, je dois partir._ ”

“ _Pas du tout. Permettez-moi de vous accompagnier._ ”

“ _C’est si gentil. D’accord,_ ” she agrees, and then she takes the man’s arm and walks away, wiping her hand surreptitiously on her skirt.

Asriel leans back against the wall to catch his breath. Stelmaria is staring at him skeptically.

“She said the library, didn’t she?”

"Yes." The snow leopard’s tail sweeps in broad arcs across the floor. “We shouldn’t follow.”

“We will, though.”

“Good—as long as we don’t miss the dinner.”

“It’ll be your job to watch the clock.”

Most scholars have already cleared out of the Institute's small library, so it’s not difficult to find her. She’s standing behind the dark leather couch that faces the center of the reading room, apparently browsing the stacks, and he comes to her quietly and drops to his knees at her side.

“Lift up your skirt,” he says, impatient.

“What for?”

“‘ _What_ _for_ ,’” he mutters, shaking his head, and she gathers her dress around her hips and leans against the couch’s crest. Asriel unfastens the small buttons at her side and helps her step out of her drawers, and the intoxicating scent of her arousal drowns out the library smell of decaying paper and calfskin as she displays her beautiful naked cunt for him.

“Don’t,” she whispers when he nudges her lips apart with the back of a crooked finger, but her head rolls back and her hips angle towards him so he knows she doesn’t mean it.

“Why not?”

“Someone will hear.”

“You’ll have to be quiet, then.”

Despite the feeble protest, she’s as hungry as he is: his fingers easing into her release a trickle of moisture that pools in his palm. He presses his mouth into her soft, damp fur and tastes a musky forest floor just after rain, a secret spring fed by mountain snow, fresh clear sap from a young tree. All the gifts of nature are his to enjoy, and he need only kneel and receive them. She gives a strained gasp as the contractions of her orgasm compress his eager hand.

Then her knees buckle, and her whole weight drops onto his shoulders.

At first all sensation is meaningless—the broken shoulder and sodden hand and chapped lips are just input, information his body was designed to dumbly receive, the way a Marconi receives a broadcast. Then pain roars through him, shorting out his thoughts, fat orange clouds of it blooming each upon the last like a zeppelin fire, black smoke blotting out the sky. He only knows he’s cried out because he can hear the echo of it ringing around the high oak walls as the two of them collapse in a heap on the floor.

Marisa has the presence of mind to scramble up again at once, so that when a librarian materializes to ask whether everything is quite all right in here she can answer plaintively, “Please forgive my outburst, I seem to have hurt my ankle. I wouldn’t mind a stiff drink if you’d be so good as to help me,” while Stelmaria, disoriented, dives behind the door.

The librarian switches the lights off as he leaves what he thinks is an empty room, so Asriel finds himself lying alone in the dark with tears in his eyes, staring at a pale smear of silk charmeuse on the parquet that turns out to be oyster-gray tap pants. He stuffs them in his pocket and, massaging his stiff limbs, heads for the dining room.

By the time he gets there she has half the bar in thrall, and he hangs back to admire her. Pressing ice in a cloth napkin against her fraudulent sprain, she sips a gin cocktail while the Chairman of the Institute inquires after her husband. It’s wonderful how skillfully she charms them; each subtle movement of her body is calculated to deploy like a missile. These poor old fools don’t know what hit them, he thinks with undue pride. Every man in the room is half in love with her already—every man but him.

Her restless monkey dæmon is wandering, careful never to stray conspicuously far, but when he passes Asriel lifts his head, offering a glimpse his face. The monkey grins his little gargoyle’s grin of pleasure. In a real monkey it would be a threat.

“Edward’s a public servant, his only concern is his constituents,” Marisa is explaining sweetly. “I’m afraid the abstract sciences have no allure for him at all. He’d never say it, but I think he considers my research rather whimsical.”

“If I had a wife,” remarks a gentleman with large white mustaches, “I’d want her home, not fooling around in a laboratory. I tell you a woman is always better suited to the domestic sphere. If she’s blessed with intellect she should be wise enough to apply it where she can actually be of some use.”

“Yes, it’s quite a wonder you’re not married,” Marisa says dryly, to general amusement. She drinks, playing for time, while the monkey, with the pretense of fixing her drooping hair ornament, speaks briefly in her ear. “My ankle’s much better now. I think I’d better go apply myself to something domestic, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen.”

“Please don’t let Lord Graham offend you, Mrs. Coulter,” says the Chairman, half-rising. “He means no harm.”

“Of course not, you’ve all been delightful company, but I really _must_ say goodnight,” she insists with convincing regret, and, drink still in hand, limps away without a backwards glance. Once the dining room is out of sight, she all but leaps into her lover’s arms.

“Oh, well done, Peter,” the Chairman can be heard to grumble, and Marisa stifles a smile against Asriel’s lips.

“This way,” Stelmaria urges quietly, the monkey close at her side. She leads them into a gallery, dark but not locked. The dim ceiling is painted to resemble the Aurora. Marisa stares up at it, eyes wide with wonder.

“Have you never been here before?”

“Of course I have,” she snaps, but then, catching herself, she plasters on her prettiest smile. “Just not in this room.”

“You’re not a member of the Institute, are you?”

“No, I came with a friend, as his guest. I didn’t realize you accepted female members.”

“There’s no rule against it, but it’s a subject that very few women seem to take an interest in.”

“I can’t imagine why,” she says coolly, sipping her drink, evading his reach for her waist.

“I could sponsor your application. I am on the board.”

She gives him a sour look. “Don’t do me any favors, Asriel.”

He shrugs, cornering her behind a display case, and reaches out to finger her hair with his good hand.

“Isn’t your friend going to miss you?”

“I don’t think he will, no. He has designs of his own, on the Treasurer, I believe.”

“Ambitious,” Asriel mumbles by her ear.

“Reckless,” Marisa corrects him, licking at his throat. “With no possibility of a legitimate association, the man will always have him at a disadvantage.”

“Perhaps they’re in love,” he smiles, and kisses her, holding her close so she can feel his erection pressing between her hips.

“So much the worse for them.”

Adeptly, one-handed, she unfastens his trousers, pulling his penis loose like a rat sprung suddenly from a trap. She hugs his waist from behind, her left arm nestled under his in the sling, leaving her right free to manipulate him, and kisses him softly behind the ear.

He’s acutely aware of how abject it is, the raw red appendage protruding from his body, defenseless and fat with blood like a leech. It’s obscene to let it lie out in the open, and he feels the powerful instinct to hide it, let it burrow somewhere safe, but there’s no way to communicate this to her that’s not unspeakably humiliating. She trails a light, dry fingertip up the ventral ridge and lazily circles the delicate fold of his foreskin as if oblivious to his distress. She already knows, he realizes. She’s doing it on purpose.

There’s the sound of a door, and as she looks up she spits into her hand and begins to masturbate him in earnest. The monkey reappears and hops to her shoulder, indifferent to the situation in progress, and with his head next to hers Asriel can just hear the harsh little whisper: “Only janitors. At the other end of the gallery for now.”

“Anyone who’d know us?” she murmurs, still pumping so inattentively she might be washing her hands. Bright golden honey is dripping slowly down his belly and up his thighs, and Asriel’s legs are trembling.

“No. But we should go.”

She drops his penis quickly as if bored, and leaves him to deal with it while she straightens her skirt. He swallows, tucking the battered thing away. “Where now?”

“It’s you who’s on the board, after all. Where would you suggest?”

Asriel sighs and tries to think. Then he smiles at her, not too wolfishly, he hopes. “The ladies’ down the hall should be free.” She rolls her eyes but can’t suppress a laugh, and he grabs her sticky hand and half-drags her from the gallery, not caring who sees now, stumbling drunk with desire. This time the monkey leads the way.

He wants to force himself into her the second the lavatory door locks behind them, to collapse upon her with the inexorable power of an avalanche, and he finds himself pushing her with his entire body weight into the wall as if to press her through it, and his hand that should have tenderly cupped her chin is nearly choking her. He makes himself release her, yanking her skirt up, feeling for the wetness between her thighs and driving into it like a hammer.

“At least let me undress—" she starts to protest, but the collision below steals the words, mangling them into a startled, savage cry.

“Hop up,” he says, lifting her from underneath with his good hand so she can knot her legs at his waist, and when she loosens her grip on his neck her weight forces him so deep inside her that she gasps. Her hair slides up the wall behind her. He looks into her astonished eyes thinking they’re his own.

One-armed he can support her, but not fuck her as well as he’d like to, so he kicks his discarded jacket to the center of the floor and lays her down as gently as he can. She hangs on, trying to make it easy, but the strain must show in his face because when he kisses her she pushes him away. Still holding him inside, snug and still as an egg in a nest, she undresses him: unbuckling the sling, loosening the knot of his tie, unbuttoning his waistcoat and shirt, easing the singlet over his head. Right away he regrets it.

His whole left side is splashed with green and yellow bruises, and the tops of his shoulders are reddening, too, from their fall in the library. Her avid expression curdles on her face, and strangely he feels her cunt convulse around him: clenching sharply, followed by a gradual release.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” she asks quietly.

“It’s not important. Don’t stop.”

“I wasn’t going to, but…” He glares at down her, daring her to pity him, but as her eyes move like solicitous fingers over his injuries he realizes she’s not concerned, but thrilled. “You were trying to impress me. Weren’t you?”

He forces a laugh, avoiding her eyes. “No. Why should I want to impress you?”

“You were afraid…”

“Ridiculous,” he mutters, but a fist of iron clenches around his heart, so he kisses her, a rough kiss, demanding and cruel, smothering her like a cat smothers an infant, until she’s breathless and whimpering, inarticulate little grunts and coos of pleasure as she lifts her hips in time with his, touching his face imploringly.

Insidiously sweet, she murmurs, “Couldn’t we switch places? This floor’s so cold…”

“All right.” Unwilling to break their point of contact, he leans on his injured arm long enough to clutch her by the waist and roll her over him. It feels like being crushed between boulders, and he groans but there’s no shame in that. The pain and pleasure that had battled for supremacy over his senses now overlap, indistinguishable. She pulls her dress over her head, baring soft young skin stretched taut, waiting for touch. Soon he’s going to fill her to overflowing, he thinks, after all this time—that will show her—fill her ’til he tastes himself on the backs of her teeth.

“You’re close,” she says, and he nods. “Me too.” Lacing her fingers through his, she pins his hands at his sides and grinds him violently into the ground. He clings to her, gasping, knowing only that she must not stop and he must not let her, for the entire universe is balanced precariously on the spot where their bodies are joined. A weightless black eternity descends to void his mind, and he floats there, in two bodies, knowing nothing.

Distantly, at the lips of the chasm, he sees himself falling with death breathing down his neck, his house haunted by a woman’s ice-cold ghost, images he now lacks the strength to hold at bay, and as she wrings his pleasure from him terror rushes in to fill the empty space. A cry is torn from his lips, a sob in the shape of her name, exactly as it was in the crevasse, and as he ejaculates his chest begins to spasm uncontrollably. He covers his face with his hands and they come away wet. He can’t bring himself to look at her, because if she pities him now he’ll die.

She lays her head down on his shoulder, exactly where it hurts most, because the only part of him that isn’t shaking is where the bones are near the skin. He holds her tightly, like a child holds a doll, though the muscles of his upper arms protest. Taking big open-mouthed breaths, he blinks until he can discern the embossed tin panels on the ceiling, and counts them until he feels more like himself. She lies very still in his arms, perhaps sleeping, but Asriel hears movement now in the hall outside. People are being seated for dinner, and there will be questions if he’s not among them. Stelmaria should have warned him, but she has eyes only for the monkey, who holds her big head in his lap, hypnotically stroking her sleek brow. Anticipating an interruption, he throws Asriel an unmistakable glare.

“Marisa. Wake up, my love. We can’t stay here.”

“Oh, Asriel, oh God,” she sighs, stretching. “Let’s never be apart again, not ever, I can’t bear it.”

“That’s always been entirely your decision,” he says, immediately ashamed of how bitter it sounds coming out.

She nods, smiling sadly, as if explaining bad news to a child. “I understand that it must seem that way to you.” She wipes her face, though there are no tears to wipe. “Let’s not fight. Let me help you dress.”

“That’s not necessary,” he lies, gloomily anticipating the contortions required to sleeve his own injured arm. He finds his undershorts and shakes them out one-handed. “Don’t treat me like your husband.”

“Never,” she says firmly, and Asriel searches for notes of regret in her voice but finds none. She kneels, still naked, and as she does up the mother-of-pearl buttons at his waist he thinks of the time in the church when he saw her praying. She told him she'd been praying for his death. His penis twitches near her face; he wonders if she sees. “Please,” she says, offering an open sock.

He clutches her small shoulder for balance. “I’ve never in my life loved a woman as I love you,” he says simply. “I never will again.”

“You know I feel the same,” she answers, though it never occurred to him before to doubt it, and she eases him into his shirtsleeves, caressing the base of his skull as she fastens his collar. She crouches to let him step into his trousers, then tucks the shirt in, deliberately slow. “What’s going to become of us?” she sighs, and holds out his waistcoat.

“I’ll tell you,” he replies, slipping into it cautiously. “You’re going to walk out there on my arm and say you’ll have no man but me. And then we’ll enjoy a very fine dinner together. Veal, I think they said.”

“No,” she smiles, adjusting the sling at his neck. She picks up his jacket from the floor and finds a white lozenge-shaped smear on the black silk lining. “Oh dear,” she says, starting towards the sink. “I’ll have to—“

“Don’t bother. It’s an improvement.” Shrugging, she holds the right side of the jacket out for him, then drapes the left over his folded arm. She passes him a comb from her bag and then begins to dress herself.

“How about this,” Asriel tries again, running it under the tap. “You’ll go home and I’ll stay. In the morning, after Edward goes to work, you’ll come directly to my house.” He combs his hair perfectly smooth and steals a flower for his lapel from the arrangement by the sink. “And then I’ll fuck you until you until you can’t walk straight, and you’ll have no choice but to stay with me forever.”

Marisa laughs as if she thinks he’s joking, but when her face crinkles tears spill from her eyes. She blots them before they can fall. “All right,” she says.

He holds her by the chin and kisses her. “Will you?”

“Yes. Now please, go. I want to be alone.”

Generously, he obeys.

“If it isn’t Lord Asriel!” Lord Graham complains when he appears in the dining room. “How good of you to join us.” As he takes his seat, Asriel sheds his suit jacket and drapes it on the back of the chair, forgetting to hide the lining.

“Don’t mind him, he’s been in a mood all evening,” the Chairman interrupts, signaling for wine. “You should have joined us earlier, there was the most remarkable woman—but it seems you just missed her.”

Stelmaria nips at his fingers, reminding him to take care, but he ignores her.

“Missed her? Mrs. Coulter?” he says as he looks around the room with a smile, thinking of all he still has yet to accomplish, tonight and this year and this endless lifetime. “Why, yes, it seems I did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit where it's due to septmars whose beautiful ["Hand in Unlovable Hand"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21593899) originated, I think, the brilliant idea that the ladies room is the best place to fuck at the Royal Arctic Institute.
> 
> Translation of the gratuitous French:
> 
> "Who's there? Hello? Is that you, Mrs. Coulter?"  
> "Yes, it's me, Director. How nice to see you again."  
> "The pleasure is all mine, Madame. I would recognize your voice anywhere. But are you looking for something? All these offices are closed..."
> 
> "What did you think of the lecture? More exciting than usual, wasn't it?"  
> "Yes, if all of that really happened. It seemed to me the man was a little full of himself..."
> 
> "Are you all right, Madame?"  
> "I'm fine, thank you, but—I've just remembered—there's a book waiting for me at the library upstairs. Sorry, I have to go."  
> "Not at all. Let me accompany you."  
> "How kind. Very well."


End file.
